dimprov

Thanks!

What's the solution then for a full disaster recovery without all this rigaramo with office xp? Do you agree it's disk imaging? Or am I missing something? If so, what disk imaging software does dantz recommend? I'm sorry to say that I'm ready to jump ship at this point.

Should I make a disaster recovery set everytime I do a full backup? Or, if I do a full backup, can I use a disaster recovery set I created earlier to do a full restore? I seem to recall that a disaster recovery set is somehow directly tied to a specific full backup.

On point #1, I'm not quite sure what you mean by allowing upgraders to "keep" disaster recovery. Is there no disaster recovery in 6.0? Or would I have to pay extra to have disaster recovery if I were a new customer for 6.0 and not an upgrader? I'm confused.

Thanks. Does anyone reading this forum know of backup software that addresses point #2 in this thread (i.e. backup software that will do a disaster recovery without forcing you to full reinstall on Office XP)? I'm not sure if this problem is generic to all backup software because of XP, but frankly a backup that cannot do a full restore all by itself is, in my judgement, not really doing a backup and is putting excess burden on the person (me) doing the restore. Think about it. Not only do you have to re-install office xp , but you then have to download and re-install all the office service packs and other updates. This is *very* time consuming. Obviously, disk imaging would handle it, but that seems extreme. It's mind boggling if it's the year 2002 and no genuine backup software exists.

I have 5.6.132 version of retrospect express. Hard to tell if there has been a bug fix patch release since my version. Can't find a version history on the website.

I agree. What good is a backup unless you can verify it's quality? I worry about this a lot, as will anyone who has ever tried a disaster recovery only to find out there was a problem with the backup in question. With XP it's almost impossible to verify, because you can't do a test restore to a dummy machine. The closest I've come to a workaround to this problem is doing a test restore to a different partition on the same machine, but that tactic isn't really supported the retrospect product (see my posts in the express section) and you have to jump through a lot of undocumented hoops to make it work.

What's the future upgrade policy for people who buy 6.0? If I'm paying $49 to upgrade from 5.6 to 6.0, does that mean I pay more to upgrade to 6.1 when that comes out? i.e. do I get nicked all along the way, or am I covered until 7.0?

What does it mean to duplicate the registry, and why might I want to?

Has this problem been fixed in the 6.0 release?

I'm using 5.6 for backing up my desktop. 1. What are the pros/cons of upgrading to 6.0? 2. One problem I had with 5.6 under XP is that in doing a complete disaster recovery restore, I had to manually reinstall all of microsoft office XP pro. Has this been fixed? 3. Any other big reasons to upgrade, or is 6.0 mostly a bug-fix release (with, of course, it's own set of new bugs)? 4. Also, the $49 upgrade fee: do I get a fresh 6.0 disk for that, or is that a layered thing where I have to keep my 5.6 disk? 5. Finally, I bought 5.6 this year. Isn't there a free upgrade to 6.0 for people like me who recently purchased 5.6? I wish I could just read the dantz website to answer most of these questions, but all I could find was rather vague marketing material. So, I guess that's more work for the folks in dantz support as more people struggle with this. Hopefully, a complete answer here can be leveraged by other readers.

Why install the beta? Isn't the final release available? They seem to be selling it. Usually they don't sell beta's. I'm curious, because I was just now thinking about upgrading versus buying. The price difference isn't very much. On the other hand, I only recently bought 5.6, so another $49 seems unkind.

I don't know how to find the answer to that.

Try Nero for burning an iso to see if it helps. It works for me.

Why is that? I had to office pro xp repair utility. Why is getting a decent full restore using disaster recovery from scratch so difficult?